Way of the world

By Craig Brown

12:01AM GMT 29 Jan 2005

The luckiest man in the world

Shortly after being appointed a Beatle, Ringo Starr is said to have asked: "What's a scruff like me doing with all this lot?" That was in 1962. Forty-three years on, he is probably asking himself the same question. What, he must be wondering, is a scruff like him doing in the company of Batman, Spiderman and The Incredible Hulk?

Stan Lee, the creator of Spiderman, has announced that he is turning Ringo into a cartoon superhero. "Ringo is beloved worldwide for his commitment to people and his singular wit," Lee told the Hollywood Reporter this week. "Our Ringo superhero character will combine these qualities, along with Ringo's secret powers. He will be an evil-battling, Earth-saving superhero with a great sense of rhythm." Only if Stan Lee had announced plans to turn Nicholas Soames into an Earth-saving superhero could his choice have seemed more surprising. Even the notion that Ringo has "a great sense of rhythm" is apparently open to dispute.

Asked whether Ringo was the best drummer in the world, John Lennon replied rather rudely that he wasn't even the best drummer in The Beatles.

On September 12, 1962, when John, Paul and George brought Ringo along to the studios for the recording of Love Me Do, their producer, George Martin, was taken by surprise. He had been expecting Pete Best, but the three of them had just sacked Pete Best (because he was better-looking than them, or so Pete Best's mum, Mona, later claimed).

George Martin asked to audition Ringo. Once he had heard him play, he decided to use a session drummer called Andy White instead. It is Andy White who can be heard on Love Me Do, though those with sharp ears may just be able to make out Ringo somewhere in the background: feeling sorry for him, George Martin had given him a tambourine, before placing him at a discreet distance from the microphone.

Ringo Starr has, over the years, become a living symbol of good luck. In the same way, poor old Pete Best has become a living symbol of rotten luck.

On August 16, 1962, Brian Epstein took Pete Best to one side and said: "The boys want you out of the group. They don't think you're a good enough drummer."

"It's taken them two years to find out I'm not a good enough drummer?" replied Best, indignantly. But there was nothing he could do about it. Within the next two years, The Beatles grossed £17 million. Meanwhile, Pete Best became a baker, and earned a weekly wage of £8.

Pete Best is now famous for not being famous. He has his own band, The Pete Best Band, and his own website, www.petebest.com. Its slogan describes Best as "The Man Who Put the Beat in Beatles".

"When not performing with his band, Pete has a busy schedule undertaking a variety of celebrity duties" reads the website. And as for The Pete Best Band: "Right from the first beat, you'll be immersed in nostalgia, listening to 'the best years' of The Beatles, 1960-62". Among the recommendations for The Pete Best Band is this: "A top-quality band with a top quality show". The compliment comes from "Eric McDow (Canadian Promoter)".

Ringo's name may now be a byword for good luck, but his early years were desperately unlucky.

When I went on the Beatles coach tour of Liverpool a few years ago, I was struck by how salubrious the childhood homes of the other three were compared with Ringo's. John's childhood home, now a National Trust property, makes it clear that he was more of a Middle-Class Hero than he liked to imagine.

John, Paul and George spent their childhoods in pleasant houses with front gardens. But Ringo was born into real poverty, in a dockside slum called The Dingle. When he was six years old, his appendix burst and peritonitis set in.

He was in a coma for 10 weeks, and spent a full year in hospital.

Aged 13, he developed pleurisy, and spent a further two years in hospital, where he was allowed to play the drums in a hospital band. After hospital, he never returned to school, but went straight into his first job, as a messenger with British Railways. After six weeks, he was sacked from that job for failing his medical.

Of course, this grim start in life makes Ringo's good luck, when it eventually arrives, all the more dazzling, and all the more wonderful. The weedy Clark Kent may have turned into Superman, but young Richard Starkey's transformation into Ringo Starr was far more extreme, and, unlike Superman, he has never been obliged to change back.

His lack of good looks or talent and his robust dullness ("It wasn't as much fun as Butlin's," he told reporters when he left the Maharishi's ashram after only 10 days) have in many ways been the making of him. If Mrs Best was right, and Pete Best was indeed sacked from The Beatles because John, Paul and George were jealous of his looks, then Ringo's exceptional plainness - he has always born a remarkable resemblance to the late Yasser Arafat - must have been the key factor in getting him the best job in the world.

Even when he became world-famous, and began buying mansions the world over and stepping out with beauties like Vivienne Ventura and Lyndsey de Paul and Barbara Bach, Ringo never became an object of envy. On television this week, John Lennon's half-sister, Julia, said she wished John had never been a Beatle, because then he would still be alive. But Mark Chapman would never have been interested in shooting Ringo. What would have been the point? In fact, Ringo's singular lack of accomplishment - his solo albums are sung entirely off-key - has guaranteed his survival.

Ringo's dull, flat narration of the dull, flat Thomas the Tank Engine books already makes him the only Beatle known to the under-10s. And now he is to be further immortalised as the man who saves the world. And Stan Lee is surely right to have chosen Ringo as a 21st-century superhero. He is the common man for whom providence keeps coming up trumps, the triumphantly untragic hero, raised higher and higher by his flaws.